Hoo boy looks like I have been tagged as well. I know I am going to get a headache finding anyone at all to tag. I will do my best. But first for the 5 things you did not know about me:
- I am an oenophile (wine lover). I have a first class wine cellar in my basement, and I regularly by bottles of wine that I put in there to store for 5 to 10 years before drinking it. I have been doing this for a while now, so I get to pull bottles out regularly too. Favorite types are Bordeaux, Cabernet, Zinfandel, Rioja, and Ribera del Duero.
- I really enjoy playing basketball. I play pick up games twice a week with a group of guys from my town that are 15 to 20 years younger than I am. Not one of them can outrun me in a flat sprint down the court. However, most of them are a bit quicker than I am around the basket. All in all, I still really look forward to it. It’s a good group of guys.
- Took 8 years to get through college. Actually bombed out of the first college I went to, Tufts University because I had issues with the conflicts between partying late into the night and class work. I also discovered that it’s hard to pass courses where you don’t even show up for exams. Went back to school at Northeastern University, and paid for it on my own this time. Graduated Class Marshall with a 3.93 (out of 4.0) GPA. Carried the class flag down the center aisle of the Boston Garden during the graduation ceremony.
- I started my career as a hardware engineer, designing PC Boards for Loran C Transmitters (the navigation systems everyone used before GPS). Then I became a software engineer. Among other things, I helped install a Loran C navigation system on the Bay of Biscay (off the west coast of France). This involved 14 weeks of working on the French Naval base at Ile Longue, which at the time was where they housed their nuclear weapons. Creepy experience getting on and off the base. Had top secret military clearance from the French military. Unusual for a US citizen. As a side note, it was this trip where I developed a love for wine.
- In the early 90s, I played a key role in the early days of AOL. My division of Phoenix Technologies has a deal with Quantum Computer Services to promote their America Online product into the PC Manufacturers (we had salespeople with those contacts, and they didn’t back then, also, the company renamed itself America Online during the course of the deal). We introduced them into many major OEMs and helped drive some of their very early subscriber growth (hundreds of thousands of subscribers, which was huge back then).
So my attempts to tag some people: Michael Jensen, author of the blog tag tree, Philipp Lenssen, of Google Blogoscoped, David Temple, of SEM SEO Certification and Training, Vanessa Fox, of Google Webmaster Central, and that’s about all I can think of right now…
